The Secret Life of Online Moms: Anonymity and Disinhibition on YouBeMom.com

By Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck. 2013

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Moms are one of the fastest growing demographics online. While much is known about where they spend their time, little is known about how they spend it. Using a dataset of over 51 million posts and comments from the website YouBeMom.com, this paper explores what kinds of topics moms talk about when they are not constrained by norms and expectations of face-to-face culture. Results show that almost 5% of posts are about dh, or “dear husband,” but these posts tend to express more negative emotion than other posts. The average post is only 124 characters long and family and daily life are common categories of posting. This suggests that YouBeMom is used as a fast-paced social outlet that may not be available to moms in other parts of their lives. This work concludes with a discussion of anonymity and disinhibition and puts forth a new provocation that moms, too, spend time online “for the lulz.”

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “13 For instance, users are more likely to share unpopular opinions or to make sensitive or personal disclosures in private or anonymous spaces, than they are to do so in public ones (Bernstein et al., 2011; Schoenebeck, 2013b; Shelton et al., 2015).”
Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat (2016, background): “Previous relevant work has focused on more temporary sharing online, including examinations of anonymous sites like 4chan or YouBeMom (Bernstein et al., 2011; Schoenebeck, 2013), “throwaway accounts” on Reddit (Leavitt, 2015), real-time sharing during disasters (Vieweg, Hughes, Starbird, & Palen, 20”
Understanding Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Abuse Through the Lenses of Support Seeking and Anonymity (2016, background): “Posts on an online anonymous forum for moms discuss situations and issues about being a mom that are not in line with societal and cultural norms [58].”
Characterizing and predicting postpartum depression from shared facebook data (2014, unknown): “blogging [22], motherhood and parenting forums [45,36],”